"Male and Male and Male": John Rechy and the Scene of Representation

Not Telling Enough: The 'Myth of the Streets'

"This is a lie and I'm going to try like hell to convince you it's true."

John Rechy, interview

John rechy's notoriety as a writer has seemingly been based on his documentation of gay male subcultures in the 1960s and '70s. The jacket cover to the first edition of City of Night, for example, declares the novel a "bold . . . account of the urban underworld of male prostitution" and "an unforgettable look at life on the edge." It would seem that Rechy's essential contribution to American letters was quite simply to bring his own "true-life" experiences with gay sex to respectable middle class readers, presumably unfamiliar with such "underworlds" in 1963, yet inexplicably curious about them. Since this is what Rechy is typically praised for (if usually in less stark terms), one wonders whether, without this ethnographic and even autobiographic aspect, Rechy's novels would have been the success that they were?

Rechy, for one, seems to authorize and validate this truth-value in his novels. He explicitly describes his most philosophical text, The Sexual Outlaw, as a "prose-documentary," recording for the reader "sex-hunts throughout Los Angeles for three days and nights" (15). It is well-known, as it was at the time he was writing, that Rechy participated first-hand in the worlds he describes: California body-building culture, hustling and cruising on the streets of Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, etc. And Rechy's most notorious display of his own life in his novels occurs on the jacket cover, where Rechy often posed shirtless in the very same style as the hustlers he writes about. Undoubtedly, as Ricardo Ortiz notes, "Rechy loves to offer himself up as an erotic image" ("Sexuality" 114).

It is strange to think that this image, certainly marketed towards a minority of gay male readers, would have proven relatively successful with a more staid audience curious about so-called "underground" gay life. Nevertheless City of Night was a big hit, and so we might explain its success through Rechy's opportunity to "come out" to his readers, to reveal to them an unknown truth that played on their desires for it. The desire for a truth of sexuality (especially a sordid one) is indeed an immensely powerful force, as queer theory has repeatedly demonstrated.¹

As is the case with all desire, it also elicits repulsion; not as a force counter to that desire, but rather as an integral component of it. The critic Alfred Chester, in an openly hostile review of City of Night for The New York Review of Books remarked, "I can hardly believe there is a real John Rechy" (97). This quotation is where I'd like to begin because it manifests, through its apparent opposition to Rechy's documentation of so-called truth (i.e. as a denial), a binary structure of knowledge and desire; namely, the closet. It is not only Chester's renunciation of Rechy's work that is problematic, but the entire epistemological structure.² Even the most optimistic and enthusiastic reader of Rechy, including those who would denounce Chester's reaction as homophobic denial, would then propagate that structure by having to insist on the truth of Rechy's writing over and against Chester's falsification of it.³

What is important, then, is not whether the novels are "true" or not. They might very well be, or they might not be, and in the end there is no real way to know for sure. What matters is the way that fantasy overwhelms this question of the truth in Rechy's writing, that we cannot separate our own desires and anxieties from it when we consider whether it is believable or not. What matters is the way our desire is directed in response to the question opened up by Rechy's fantasy: either we disavow this fantasy and assert, "no, it can't be true!" or, if we desire this fantasy, we eagerly cling to it, insisting, "yes, it must be true...